Meet the Renaissance Men Behind America's Hottest New Hotels

Hot off the debut of the Dean Hotel in Providence—and with two new properties on tap in Detroit and New Orleans—Brooklyn-based design firm Ash NYC is redefining the role of the hotelier by developing and designing every inch of their properties from the ground up.

Ash NYC's Williamsburg studio is located in just the kind of industrial redbrick warehouse the firm might like to turn into a hotel. Behind the gritty, graffiti-scrawled exterior is a 3,000-square-foot open-plan office that’s all stark and airy, with whitewashed walls and floors, rows of neat workstations, Børge Mogensen chairs, and trays filled with Nero Marquina marble slabs and black-walnut wood samples.

"Our first office was in Jonathan's apartment on Ash Street, coincidentally—then we moved to a kosher dessert factory that we turned into an office and storefront,” says CEO Ari S. Heckman, 32. Heckman, CFO Jonathan Minkoff, 30, and creative director Will Cooper, 28, are the trio behind the emerging developer-designer firm. This invocation of the historic, a sense of a building's place in a city or neighborhood's past, is a recurring theme for the seven-year-old Ash. Carving out a modern space within an authentic structure is their specialty.

They've spent the morning pasting cutouts onto André-the-Giant-size inspiration boards for two new hotels they're developing and designing simultaneously in Detroit and New Orleans. Spend some time with these guys and you’ll see they are inspired as much by buildings with potential as they are by underdog cities. On the board for Detroit, Motown references (a Marshall amp, a portrait of The Supremes) sit alongside black-and-white photographs of lithe, tatted-up rocker types and city landmarks like Mies van der Rohe’s Lafayette Park. The New Orleans board has a brighter palette with Cuban and Moroccan interiors as well as images ranging from Picasso’s Blue Period to Wes Anderson’s 2007 short film, Hotel Chevalier.

It’s a far cry from the real estate private-equity startup where Heckman and Minkoff met in 2007. Their desks were next to each other, and casual office chitchat quickly turned to long conversations about their shared interest in bridging the gap between real estate development and interior design. Just before the recession hit, they got up the nerve to go out on their own, and bought their first residential multi-family property in Providence, Heckman’s hometown. “Jonathan and I didn’t make a dollar for six years," he says. "It was like rolling a rock up a hill, and there were times when we thought, Why are we still doing this?" But they kept at it, and they hit Brooklyn at precisely the right moment, developing condos in neighborhoods like Bushwick and Greenpoint before real estate became cost prohibitive. Heckman saw their new venture as the opportunity to indulge his inner designer. "I didn't have a design education but was always interested in it, so I started with model apartments for new buildings we managed," he says. But it wasn't until Heckman met Cooper, who was working for Ralph Lauren on store interiors and mer- chandise, that the firm began to position itself as a soup-to-nuts collective. "Will brought some corporate ethos to our little company," Heckman says of their decision to bring on a third partner. Cooper adds, "I saw a design piece and a business piece, and had to figure out how to make them into one sphere, one identity—that’s what Ralph has done so well.”

Antique oil portraits found in Paris and vintage chairs from Belgium in "The Heights" room at the Dean.

Photo by Christian Harder/Courtesy the Dean

The opening in 2014 of the Dean—a 52-room hotel in the shell of a 1912 clergy house–turned–strip club in Providence—was, they say, the logical culmination of this hybrid model they’d been working toward: a chance to build something that wouldn’t disappear into the hands of a renter or buyer, where they could curate everything from the Matouk linens to the Alfred Loos–inspired cocktail lounge. Heckman says that before the Dean there wasn't really a hotel in the city that was reflective of its character and history; there were mostly corporate chains. Providence was indeed a largely untapped landscape, and in it they could create a place where they themselves—along with Brown and Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) students and alumni—would actually want to hang out in town.

Their insistence on control worked, and suddenly Providence, with the Dean as the newly minted "town square," became a long-weekend destination for New Yorkers and New Englanders (the hotel made our 2014 Hot List). They took their cues from character-rich European boutique hotels like Antwerp's Hotel Julien, the Hôtel Amour in Paris, and Rome’s Hotel Locarno but kept it quintessentially American. Its hipster eclecticism draws inspiration from lake camps and one-room schoolhouses with its mix of Hudson Bay blankets, sturdy oak school chairs, bunk beds with the occasional Prouvé piece, and oil portraits.
“One of the things we kept hitting on is this idea of what people call 'induced demand,' " Heckman says. "They want to stay at the cool hotel in Providence." But despite its youthful bent, in many ways the Dean has reprised a very 19th century notion of hotel as destination. Only here, Chemex carafes and laptops have replaced sterling teapots and top hats. The Dean proved that a hotel could not only reflect an artistically minded community but also create one by putting an emphasis on comfortable, hip communal spaces where locals can meet, work, and drink great coffee. It is precisely this lack of separation between work and play—the blend of inspiration, travel, development, and design—that separates Ash from its competition and keeps the creative conversation going among its principals.

An interior by Ash NYC at The Viridian in Boston.

Courtesy Ash NYC

Still, it's not as though they invented this formula; they acknowledge that their model owes something to mini-chains like the Ace and the Standard, which have helped shape a new hospitality landscape—one where the comforts of home have been superseded by the nuances of place. But the indie model as we know it has mostly been applied to big cities like L.A., New York, and Chicago. Ash is quickly making a name for itself in smaller cities, both for its ability to reflect local markets and for its understanding of what young (and increasingly not-so-young) travelers, who value authentic experience over anonymous luxury, are looking for. "We can create a specific brand around the city that delivers the real experience someone wants," Cooper says. It's an experience they're able to steer because not only did they design the hotel, they operate it too. This vertical integration means that they’re owners, developers, designers, consultants, operators. (They’re even launching a furniture line—sleek cocktail tables, daybeds, stools—available this fall on 1stdibs.com.) Everything is done in-house, so there’s no disconnect in the passing of the baton

It’s a holistic approach perfectly geared toward under-saturated second cities. "The hospitality market is changing to react to the demand for this type of product," Minkoff says. "So we want to be one step ahead by going to the places with intrinsic cultural drivers in the market." This year, Ash acquired two new properties: an 1860s former church rectory/school complex in New Orleans's Marigny neighborhood, and a crumbling Renaissance Revival building in downtown Detroit that once housed the musical instruments company Wurlitzer—both projected to open as hotels in 2017. "You have all these people who are interested in going to Detroit but just need a little push," Heckman says. "We think we can be that magnet."

Each city has its challenges. New Orleans is a destination going through something of an indie hotel boom, and Detroit is on the cusp of what many hope will be an artistic and economic renewal. Both projects are ambitious, and far more of a gamble than Providence. Their plan for the two, however, is similar. They become students of the city, completely immersing themselves in the culture and community. The process starts with identifying essential local wayfinders—or sherpas, as they call them—who can lead them to the longtime residents, community leaders, architects, preservationists, and restaurateurs needed to get a major project like this off the ground. “Every city has a few key connectors who have access to hard-to- find resources or a cranky shop owner who’ll only let you in at a certain hour,” Heckman says. “We start to form the network.” Next comes a bit of poking around and check- ing out different properties and neighbor- hoods. Then, once the pieces are in place, total immersion—visiting an art gallery one day, a laundry facility the next; attending civic meetings and functions; getting the lo- cal community on board. “After you acquire real estate, you’re identifying the makers, ar- tisans, anyone who could potentially have a hand in the hotel,” says Heckman.

A sleek Jean-Pierre Nicolini leather chair, once owned by Picasso, in a room at the Dean.

Photo by Christian Harder/Courtesy the Dean

They're now breaking ground in Detroit and New Orleans and have been documenting these hotel conversions on Instagram, posting snapshots as they restore the Detroit tower and excavate the old schoolhouse in the Marigny. Looking at their renderings and existing body of work, you immediately see that they are as much preservationists as they are designers who understand the value of restraint in a renovation in order to preserve the soul of a building. "We're using materials that exist on-site, we're preserving," Heckman explains. "It's a really good strategy for designing hotels because we're able to be very simple and very economical with the core architectural materials. Then we’re layering in all relatively simple neutral materials, letting furniture and lighting create more of the scene."

It’s a very sensible strategy—and a very millennial notion. "We'd rather spend money on creative than hire someone to take the trash out," Cooper adds with a laugh. "I mean, I was in charge of getting the trash out until, like, last week."